


flicker, fade

by Likedeadends



Series: 25 days of Johnmas [7]
Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Internalized Homophobia if you squint, M/M, Relationship Issues, Somewhat Ambiguous Ending, Young Love, hurt not comfort, post breakup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:16:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28054503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Likedeadends/pseuds/Likedeadends
Summary: Sometimes you meet someone and they change you forever, even if they don't intend to be with you forever. Dejun reflects on that.
Relationships: Suh Youngho | Johnny/Xiao De Jun | Xiao Jun
Series: 25 days of Johnmas [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2038778
Comments: 5
Kudos: 23





	flicker, fade

**Author's Note:**

> their ages in this story are meant to be 15 & 17 and I couldn't exactly work that in within the writing. forewarning there are mentions of kissing and a very brief mention of the topic of sex -- if that doesn't make you comfortable with the ages, then please feel free to click away.

It’s almost February 9th and Dejun doesn’t think he’s ever going to forget what that means. 

Who starts dating on someone’s birthday? 

(People who breakup right before Christmas). 

Dejun and Johnny have an unspoken agreement. They don’t talk anymore. They have unfollowed each other on social media, they don’t keep up with each other’s family, they don’t run into each other. 

They text each other twice a year. Once on Johnny’s birthday and once on Dejun’s. Two sentences each time: “Happy birthday!”, “Thank you!”

They met before they were old enough to understand what loving someone actually meant and then refused to accept that. 

They were a world apart from each other. They met online and Dejun’s friends teased him constantly, made jokes about him getting catfished or being too much for someone who could see him every day. It never hurt him, not really, because he could tell Johnny about it and Johnny would know what to say to make it better. 

They talked about everything, music at first because it was common ground before they expanded into anything and everything else. 

Dejun still knows Johnny’s favorite bands. He keeps them in his music library, but skips the songs whenever they come on shuffle. He keeps Johnny in his peripherals and never closer than that. 

It’s 11:30 on February 8th. Dejun looks at his phone and thinks for a while. 

They broke up five years ago. Johnny has graduated from college by now. Dejun snuck a peak at his Instagram, because he couldn’t help himself, and he knows Johnny has someone else-- a boyfriend he seems to love an awful lot. 

It stings. It reminds him of the first time he went to visit Johnny in person. 

He convinced his mother that Johnny was his best friend and they needed to meet. His mother only agreed because it had been two years of asking Dejun why he was smiling at his phone and Dejun answering back with a simple: “Johnny.” 

To this day he isn’t sure if his mother figured out that him and Johnny were more than friends. It doesn’t really matter anymore. 

What matters is Dejun took the leap. He got on a plane and he went to Johnny. He met Johnny’s family and slept in his bedroom. 

They went to a theme park together, just the two of them. Dejun made a comment about it being a cliche first date, but Johnny did not seem deterred in the slightest. 

The day started so perfectly. Meeting Johnny was not the crest of a wave before it toppled over itself, it was seafoam kissing the shoreline. Inevitable, gentle, and just right. No one would have taken a picture of them embracing at the airport because it didn’t look like a big deal. They just fell in step with each other and shared private smiles. 

At the theme park it was a lot of the same. They talked like two people who saw each other every day. They shared a soda, argued playfully about which rides to go on, and took pictures when they found good lighting. 

Things were perfect until they weren’t. 

Dejun, starry eyed and soaring, reached for Johnny’s hand when they were walking. Their fingers brushed, Johnny squeezed Dejun’s hand, and then he pulled away. 

“I just don’t think I’m ready for that.” He said quietly, when they sat down together in the spinning teacups. Dejun nodded and let it be. He knew Johnny wasn’t out to his friends or family, and he wouldn’t want him to feel uncomfortable. He got too wrapped up in a fantasy. 

That night, they squeezed onto Johnny’s twin mattress and watched netflix on his laptop. Johnny insisted on being the little spoon, even though he was taller (and older! Dejun would hiss at him). 

They watched a mindless sitcom and whispered back and forth to each other. Around midnight, Johnny turned in Dejun’s arms and kissed him. That was when the wave collapsed. 

Dejun had been waiting for that kiss for well over a year. He couldn’t stop smiling, couldn’t stop petting his hands along Johnny’s side, couldn’t stop kissing him. 

They were both exhausted the next morning when Johnny’s mom woke them up to go get breakfast. But, god, they were happy. 

Temporary bliss, really. 

Dejun had to leave that morning to get back to his own life. His school, his friends, his house, his bed, his netflix queue. 

They went back to video calls and paragraph long confessions late at night. They were loud on social media but never obvious.   
(Perfect until it wasn’t). 

Dejun’s friends knew about Johnny. 

“How do you get this handsome, mysterious, older man and I can’t even get Mark to look in my direction?” Yangyang used to whine. 

“Let me see the pictures you took with him again!” Ten would demand. 

“I think we should do a group call with him one day.” Lucas liked to suggest.

They tried their hardest to make Johnny feel accepted and to support Dejun. 

Johnny’s friends did not know about Dejun. 

Dejun knew this fact purely based on social media. 

Johnny would tweet very neutral things in reply to Dejun’s tweets. He would be careful about what he liked and what he didn’t. He never mentioned his own relationship status. 

Dejun tried to tell himself he didn’t mind. People come out at their own pace and he would never try to force Johnny to do something he wasn’t comfortable with. Not his Johnny, his perfect, booksmart, mysterious, courteous Johnny. 

To himself only, he would admit he didn’t like feeling like a secret. 

The next summer, Dejun got to spend two weeks with Johnny. 

He was going to stay with Johnny and his grandmother while Johnny prepared to go to college. It was something new for both of them. A city Johnny never lived in before, one Dejun had never visited.

Level ground.

The airport did not feel like a movie scene. They fell into step with each other and it was extraordinary in the way it was mundane. It felt like every other day. Dejun liked that the most about Johnny, loving him was not monumental, it was a babbling brook. 

It was stone smoothed down over the years. It was a tree growing, steady and strong. It took time and it changed slowly, but it was no less beautiful than a lightning strike or a baby’s first giggle. 

Johnny took Dejun to another theme park. This one smaller, a little more homegrown, and absolutely perfect. 

Dejun reached for Johnny’s hand and Johnny pulled away. “I’m just not ready.” He said again. 

Dejun tried not to look around at the strangers surrounding them. People they both knew they would not see again or who regard them holding hands and completely unremarkable. He thought to himself that he didn’t like feeling like a secret, but smiled at Johnny and nodded because he understood. He did. 

They got to play house for two weeks. They shared the bed in Johnny’s grandmother’s guest room, queen sized, and big enough for them to watch shows on Netflix without worrying about pushing the laptop off. 

They kissed themselves to sleep every night. Sometimes Dejun felt bold, he would slip a hand beneath Johnny’s shirt and explore his skin. He remembered one night, resting his hand just above the waist of Johnny’s sweatpants and daring to dip his fingers below the band, just tracing skin and too scared to go any further. 

“You’re okay with that?” Johnny murmured, sounding like he was only half awake. Dejun was okay with it, just scared of moving beyond it. Something they never talked about was sex. It didn’t really come up in any of their conversations and Dejun, seemingly foolish, always assumed Johnny wouldn’t be interested since he didn’t even like holding hands in public. 

Things fell apart after that, much more rapidly than they ever came together. 

Dejun got self-conscious. He changed in the bathroom, rather than the bedroom and Johnny never commented. His hands didn’t wander when they kissed at night anymore. 

Johnny started to stay up later, out in the living room, and only ever came to bed after Dejun fell asleep.

They didn’t talk about it. Dejun excused it as being young and thinking they could just will things to go back to the way they used to be. 

Johnny stayed on his phone more, talking to people he would never introduce Dejun to. 

One day, he nearly started a dialogue. “I hope you’re having fun.” He said when they were on the deck of the community pool. 

Dejun had opted out of swimming. He was happy just watching Johnny. 

“Yeah, it’s nice here. I wish we were… spending more time together.” Dejun said carefully. 

Johnny understood immediately. He reached out and put a hand on Dejun’s knee and said “I’m sorry.” 

That was that. 

Dejun started to miss home after that. He called his mom and asked to change his return flight, because he didn’t feel welcomed anymore.

Johnny pulled away after that.

It was a really weird couple of days between the pool and the airport again. Dejun couldn’t force himself to ask questions or talk and Johnny wrapped himself up in dorm tours and buying school supplies. Dejun felt too young to be in that world. 

It wasn’t until he was on the plane home that he realized they hadn’t said ‘I love you,’ the whole time he was there. 

In the end, their breakup was as anticlimactic and them coming together. Dejun made a comment one day that Johnny must have more interesting people in his life with how much he was talking to other people and Johnny said they should end things if Dejun didn’t trust him. 

It was a childish sort of end to things. Not even a real fight. The exchange was barely a whole page of their text conversations. Dejun resolutely did not cry. 

He didn’t admit the breakup to his friends, either, not for a long time. He was embarrassed. How had he let things fall apart so easily? 

And in the days after their breakup he realized just how much Johnny had managed to reshape him in those years they knew each other. There were songs he couldn’t listen to, TV shows he couldn’t watch-- books he looked at spitefully, an entire zodiac sign he decided he hated. 

His mom would ask how Johnny was doing and he eventually had to admit to her that they didn’t talk anymore. 

Dejun went through a cycle of obsessively checking Johnny’s social media and then blocking all of them. He would find stupid excuses to text Johnny, trying to cling to the idea of remaining friends. They talked about a new album coming out and Dejun still remembers the way his heart was racing while things felt momentarily normal. 

But the conversations always petered out in a way they didn’t used to. 

That’s when Dejun started looking forward to Johnny’s birthdays. 

Because it was an excuse to talk when nothing else was reliable. Just something to remind Johnny he remembered him, he thought about him, and maybe one day they could try again. 

He sent the first happy birthday five years ago. Johnny said thank you and Dejun played it cool by not responding after that. 

Then Johnny hooked Dejun when nine months later, he texted his own happy birthday. 

It was the best present Dejun got that year, to feel remembered by his first love. His first heartbreak, too. 

They never tried to converse beyond that. Just happy birthday. Dejun can’t say what it meant to Johnny, but to him it was loaded. Remembering someone’s birthday when they blocked you on Facebook was quite a feat. 

This year, the clock turns to midnight and it’s February 9th. 

Dejun stares at his phone, the blinking cursor taunting him beneath the last short exchange. 

He thinks about saying happy birthday and how when he says it, it also means he’s still trailing behind Johnny. Still remembers his birthday and the music he plays and the movies he watches and that stupid month he tried to do roller derby and hurt himself so badly he went to the hospital. 

It makes Dejun angry. Not at Johnny, but at himself. For having a heart that was wasting so much space on someone who was important, yes, but never coming back to it. There wasn’t anything left between them, really. Dejun was in love with a phantom from five years ago. One that was still sunkissed and willing to watch Pretty Little Liars before the final season came out. 

It’s winter. Johnny wouldn’t be tanned or on the pool deck. He probably never found out who “A” was because Dejun was watching the show and Johnny just obliged. He graduated college. Dejun didn’t know anything about the degree he got or his final projects. And Johnny didn’t know anything about Dejun either. 

Something feels heavy in his chest when he thinks of Johnny remembering him as kid, in constant awe of him and too scared to get past first base. 

What always sting the most is that Dejun was never enough to make Johnny feel comfortable in his own skin. Two months after they broke up, Johnny posted a snapchat of himself kissing another man. 

Dejun stares at his blinking cursor. He didn’t even know Johnny as an out man. He knew Johnny as a secret. 

He wants to say happy birthday, because he does hope Johnny is happy. He knows if he does, though, Johnny will say it in August, which is usually around the time Dejun is just about ready to forget him. The cycle will start again and Dejun will be bitter at himself for not being able to get over something that happened half a decade ago. Young love, first love, the ruins of a stupid romance. 

He doesn’t say happy birthday. In a rush of confidence, he deleted the chain of their messages entirely. 

It doesn’t feel like relief. It doesn’t feel like anything major at all. His head still swims with the hazy memories from time to time and he knows he’ll never listen to the Taking Back Sunday albums he has saved, but it’s a start. 

In August, he doesn’t get a text from Johnny either.

**Author's Note:**

> Johnmas day 11. I'm sorry this is like not a christmas story at all but i just couldn't get myself to write smth sappy for the "anniversary" prompt so this happened instead. 
> 
> also neither of them are really supposed to be the bad guy in this. it's moreso an exploration of young love unresolved and like. the pitfalls of being awful at communicating.


End file.
